Democrats Seek to Outlaw “Conversion”

If your son wants to live as a girl, that’s just fine with leftists. But if he’s experiencing same-sex attraction and wants to start liking girls, you could be charged with a crime for helping him accomplish this. That is, if the Democrats in Congress have their way.

As the Washington Postdistorts, “Democratic lawmakers this week introduced a bill that would ban the practice of ‘conversion therapy,’ treatments that historically have targeted the LGBT community and claim to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The propaganda is in the very first sentence. The individuals in question aren’t “targeted” any more than cardiac patients are targeted with healthful diets; it’s not coercive. People make a choice to undergo such therapy and try to change their lives. The Post means to obscure the fact that these politicians aim to remove a freedom.

The Post continues, “The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act of 2017 was introduced Tuesday by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), along with Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). About 70 other members of Congress, all Democrats, have said they support the bill, which would allow the Federal Trade Commission to classify conversion therapy and its practitioners as fraudulent.”

Four states have already taken this step: California, New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois, and Vermont. New York — ranked the least free state according to a study — doesn’t have a ban but, the Post informs, “effectively prohibits conversion therapy through administrative regulations” (meaning, sneakiness).

Note that all this is occurring while children as young as four are being encouraged to be “transgender.” As American Thinkerwrites, noting the hypocrisy, “Liberals are perfectly happy if boys decide to be girls or boys decide to become homosexual. But they are definitely not happy with boys, or girls, who decide they don't like being homosexual and want help becoming normal again.”

The Post devotes a lot of ink to talking about how homosexuality used to be considered a mental disorder and cites some crazy methods social scientists once used to remedy it. The paper neglects to mention that homosexuality was declassified as a disorder in 1973 only for political reasons, not scientific ones.

Of course, there is such thing as bad “conversion therapy,” which is better called “reparative therapy.” But there are also right and wrong ways to treat heart disease, cancer, the flu or anything else. Medical history is, in fact, a never-ending story of misconceptions and mispractice sometimes shed in favor of better practices — and other times in favor of other misconceptions and mispractice.

For example, trepanning (drilling a hole in someone’s head) was often used centuries ago to treat what we today consider mental illness. Mere decades ago, psychiatrists would administer electric-shock treatments and perform lobotomies. Does this sad history mean there cannot be such thing as legitimate psychiatric practice?

We’d have to think so following the Post’s logic. Its clear implication is that because there has been some quackery in reparative therapy, it should be dismissed completely. The kicker is that the paper buttresses this case with statements decrying the therapy from — wait for it — social scientists!

The very kind of people who the Post implied were quacks when they once tried to cure homosexuality.

The same people who once thought electric-shock and lobotomies had therapeutic effect.

The people who — in accordance with the “gender neutrality” theory of quack Dr. John Money — swore up and down the sexes were the same except for superficial physical differences and that if you raised a boy as a girl, he’d be happy as one. (Now they’ve evolved from saying your “gender,” misusing that word, can be whatever society molds it to be to insisting it’s whatever you feel it is.)

So the Post makes the very fashionable case (known as fake news) that homosexuality cannot be changed and that even people who wish to change it in themselves should be denied that opportunity. So much for “My body, my choice.”

The problem is that this is an unproven assertion, as even honest homosexuals admit. For example, in the video below, homosexual commentator Milo Yiannopoulos states that same-sex attraction is more nurture than nature.

Liberals admit this, too, in a Freudian slip kind of way. Consider how NYC mayor “Bolshevik” Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has been described by leftist newspapers as a “former lesbian.” Huh? Shouldn’t she be characterized as “a re-closeted lesbian denying her true self and living a lie”?

Yet the Post quotes homosexuality activist Xavier Persad as saying that reparative therapy is “quack science” and “not based on science.” This would be unsurprising since everything surrounding this issue is quack science.

The claim there’s a “gay gene” (I have one that makes me happy) or that there’s any scientific proof whatsoever of homosexuality’s genesis is quack science. The notion that so-called “transgenderism” is a biological phenomenon and a legitimate state of being is quack science, as I’ve explainedover and over and over again. In fact, this isn’t supposed to be about science at all.

“Psychology” is a Greek word meaning “study of the soul,” and that should be — unless and until there actually is hard science on the matter — the focus when dealing with sexual deviancy. If a man seeks help eliminating adulterous fantasies, it will be handled from a moral/spiritual perspective. Why should same-sex attraction be any different?

Yet it is treated differently. There are a multitude of sexual deviations, such as bestiality, pedophilia and variations thereof. There are also countless other “paraphilias” (noticeably harmful or obsessive fetishes), including the truly bizarre, such as deriving sexual excitement from vomit, being an amputee, drinking blood, being robbed, exhibitionism, trees, stuffed toy animals, fire, being strangled, corpses, and robots. Will the leftist politicians draft bills outlawing reparative therapy for these desires as well? If not, why not? Why is one deviation from the sexual norm offered special treatment?

Speaking of which, we’re in the grip of a Great Sexual Heresy that attacks the very idea of a “norm.” Consider: I’ve often pointed out that the Left is not working to redefine marriage, but to “undefine” it. That is, by attacking marriage (one man, one woman by definition) as unfairly exclusive, without proposing a hard-and-fast alternative definition, the Left is leaving us without boundaries. This opens the door for the recognition of other conceptions of “marriage,” as an “undefinition” excludes nothing.

Likewise, those condemning the traditional conception of normality never propose a hard-and-fast alternative conception. What are to be the unbending boundaries for sexual behavior in this “Whatever works for you” world? What say you, Congressman Lieu?

Note that on January 14, 2013, the Los Angeles Times ran an article titled “Many researchers taking a different view of pedophilia: Pedophilia once was thought to stem from psychological influences early in life. Now, many experts view it as a deep-rooted predisposition that does not change.” Sound familiar?

So who knows what kind of inclinations therapists will be forbidden to cure in 20 years? In the meantime, if your son wants to don a dress and enter the girls’ bathroom, he can knock himself out.

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